Everyone loves to share what they’re watching, reading, or listening. Twitter have tweeting, Last.fm have scroblling, Facebook have stalking1. This is just one of the way to give other people a chance to say “me too”, and thus starting a conversation.

Scrobbling a song means that when you listen to it, the name of the song is sent to Last.fm and added to your music profile. It’s an activity to record your play history, while in the process, you can learn how your music tastes has changed over the time.

The most significant update in iTunes 11.1 is the addition of iTunes Radio, a main feature of the new released iOS 7 for iPhone and iPad. With iTunes Radio, you can create your personalized radio station by using the music available in iTunes Store. You can even adjust the song recommendation by including the song you like and excluding the song you hate.

Last.fm users might wonder, “Can I scrobble songs from iTunes Radio to Last.fm?”. Well, you can. iTunes treats the songs played from iTunes Radio exactly the same way as the songs played from library. Perhaps the better question is which application makes scroblling more pleasant.

While there are many applications available out there for scrobbling, I find that Bowtie2, despite the lack of updates, is the best one. It’s lightweight and unobtrusive. It also supports Growl so you can stay notified when the track has changed in iTunes.

This is important.

Usually I don’t know the title of the current playing song. That’s why having the notification to display track title and artist is useful to me. Of course I can enable Notification Center for this task, but, the shortcoming of Notification Center is the lack of cover art. This is something you can only get by using Bowtie.

Last but not least, Bowtie allows us to apply custom theme. Compared to application like GeekTool, Bowtie’s implementation is more straightforward and less CPU consuming. If you’re not sure which theme to get, I’ve shared my picked Bowtie themes before, not just once, but twice.

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